The building was trembling.
This isn't unusual as there's a railroad running along side the building.
But what was unusual was the lack of a train.
Then a loud thud and finally silence.
A few of us looked out the window.

There,
in a freshly dug trench that didn't exist moments earlier,
was a dead graboid.
It must have slammed into the foundation of I-95,
which runs along the other side of the building.

I was asked about the projects I've mentioned on the blog by a fellow cow-orker,
D,
and I thought I should summarize them.

First is “Project: Wolowizard.”
This used to refer to the entire suite of programs my team
(that is, the team I work on,
not the team I manage—I'm not a mangager)
is responsible for.

Then I wrote “Project: Sippy-Cup”
to interface with the new hipster hotness.
This ended up calling into the same backend as “Project: Wolowizard.”
So now it seems silly to consider the backend as part of “Project: Wolowizard” when it's used by two different front ends
(the other frontend interfaces with The Protocol Stack From Hell).
I'm now going to refer to the common backend as “Project: Lumbergh”
(it makes sense if you know the actual name of the program).

And that leaves “Project: America-­On-­Line-­Instant-­Messenger,”
the latest program to be written.
My fellow cow-orker T gave it its initial name,
but no one,
not even he,
really liked the name.
After some discussion it was renamed,
and thus I'm giving it a new name here in the blog—“Project: Cleese”
(which again,
makes total sense if you know the new name and the context in which it was named).

There are some other programs we're responsible for,
but as they are rarely touched I'm not going to bother mentioning them.
It's mostly legacy stuff anyway and they will most likely go away when The Protocol Stack From Hell is sent back from whence it came
(and believe me,
it can't happen soon enough).

Bunny has been binge watching “Peter Gunn” and I have to say,
the music is fantastic!
The only other TV shows that had as jazzy a score were “Twin Peaks”
and “Cowboy Bebop.”
I wish more shows used a jazz sound track, it's fun just to listen to the music.

Six years ago I had the need to fetch an image via HTTP as part of testing “Project: Lumbergh.”
At the time,
I thought You know what?
Why don't I use libcurl?
It's installed.
It's supposedly easy to use.
It'll save me the hour or so it'll take me to write the code to connect to the server,
send the request and read the reply.

It still took about an hour,
mainly to figure out how to use the darned library.
But it worked.

And then I went to test on Solaris (which is what production runs on) and well …

r2839 | spc | 2012-07-11 14:22:27 -0400 (Wed, 11 Jul 2012) | 8 lines

[Testing]

It's amazing what isn't installed on Solaris.

And yes, I do use curl for testing. Easy (if insanely large) library to use
to snarf down web requests.

I had to download libcurl and check it into the repository because it's not on Solaris.

And then I had to figure out the special ./configure options to get it compiled under Solaris.

And then I had to wait for ./configure and make to run
(and on Solaris,
this is a S—L——O———W————P—————P——————R———————O————————C—————————E——————————S—————————————S).

And then I had to figure out how to integrate this into the build system for Solaris.

And for something that was supposed to be “easy to use” turned out to be not so easy.
Nor quick.
And has been a thorn in my side these past six years.

Until Apple decided to deprecate the use of OpenSSL on Mac OS-X and later remove OpenSSL in their latest offerings.

I use said Lua module at work.

We mostly develop under Mac OS-X.

Sigh.

This has become a thorn in my side over the past few years.
The issue came up two weeks ago when my fellow cow-orker TS,
decided to update his Mac OS-X laptop and the build broke.
And it came up today because my other fellow cow-orker TS-II (same initials—go figure) did some update or other on his Mac OS-X laptop and the build broke,
but in a different way
(wow—to think that each version of Mac OS-X is a special snowflake).

Bunny and I left at O'dark 30 for our yearly trip to Brevard and we made excellent time.
The plan,
as was usual,
was I drive until the sun comes up,
letting Bunny get a bit more sleep,
then we switch places where she drives and I sleep.

11½ hours later we arrived at The Red House Inn,
our favorite place to stay.
We were fortunate in there being a break in the rain to let us unload the car,
and it was then when I had the horrible realization that my iPad
(which I use as a laptop while on vacations) was 750 miles away,
sitting were I left it at Chez Boca.

Sigh.

Obviously I have work arounds,
but it's still annoying.

Anyway, we're just relaxing after a long drive and will shortly have dinner at The Square Root.

Bunny and I are taking it easy on the first day of vaction.
The weather is nice—sun is out,
temperature is mid-70s,
and there's the sound of the neighbor mowing his rather sizable lawn.

So I'm sitting on the private porch at The Red House Inn when I attempt to check my email.
I can't.

You see,
I use mutt to read my email.
It runs directly on my email server,
but to log into my email server,
I have to first log into my home system due to filtering of ssh attempts by the hosting company
(which doesn't really bother me all that much).
But I too,
have some filtering going on at home.
I programmed my own syslog daemon to
block ssh attempts after five times,
regardless of time between attempts,
or,
as it turns out,
regardless of sucessful attempts!

Because I left my iPad at home,
I'm having to type my password.
And due to the keyboard I'm using
(it's not a Model M keyboard and therefore by default,
this keyboard sucks)
I incurred a few failed log in attempts.

Oops.

Well,
that sucks! I thought.
Wait!
I know!
I can log into work over The Corporation's VPN to my workstation there,
and from there I can log into home and fix the situation.
The problem became logging into the VPN.

And now I have two problems.

I called a fellow cow-orker,
D,
but he did not have the information I needed to configure the VPN,
but as I was working on it,
the idea came that all I really needed was a different Wi-Fi network to log in from.

Bunny and I drove to Hendersonville to view a street-based art show
(Main St. was blocked off to vehicular traffic and artists set up booths along the street).
Amid the artist booths were a slew of bears.

Obligatory Miscellaneous

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